Drawing is both physical entity
and intellectual proposition in ‘Line’, Lisson Gallery’s group exhibition,
guest-curated by Drawing Room. Fifteen international artists – whose works span
seminal artworks from the late ’60s through to performative and site-specific
pieces made especially for this exhibition – take their various lines for a
walk off the page to intermingle in the three-dimensional space of the gallery,
extending via sound into the atmosphere and reverberating via action and memory
across time.

Lisson Gallery’s almost fifty-year
history frames the exhibition. Sol LeWitt’s Wall
Drawing ♯157, a
diagonal line first drawn according to the artist’s instructions by Nicholas
Logsdail in 1973 and re-drawn again for this exhibition, suggests an expanded
field for contemporary art through its conceptual premise. Richard Long’s 1980
work A Four Day Walk describes an
imaginary line in the ground measuring 94 miles, which shifts the parameters of
drawing to consider man’s physical yet transitory relationship with the world.
Long’s ephemeral line contrasts poignantly with British artist K. Yoland’s
recent photography series, Border Land
Other (2013-2014), the result of a residency in Texas, shown alongside a
film of her performance of the same name. The performer unfurls an unruly paper
line, which refuses to settle in one spot, referencing the complexity of
carving up land on a map and the arbitrariness of borders. Here the line
describes not one person’s passage but instead a political boundary not to be
crossed, namely the border between Texas and Mexico. A recent work by Julian
Opie also brings the natural world into the gallery via a black vinyl
installation, Pine Forest. The vertical
procession of tree trunks can also be read as a parade of silhouetted figures, a
stream of barcode data or simply as abstract lines.

Brooklyn-based Maximilian
Schubert and London-based Greek artist Athanasios Argianas both present new and recent work
that employs metallic forms to execute three-dimensional drawings. Schubert’s
linear compositions cling to the gallery walls like the frames of invisible
paintings, while Argianas’s installation features a freestanding steel armature
draped with brass ribbons. Etched with words that describe subjective
measurements, such as “the length of the strand of your hair”, the ribbons’ descriptions
will be activated via spoken performances during the exhibition’s opening,
operating like a linear code that translates material into sound.

In Viennese artist Florian Pumhösl’s animated film Tract (2011), moving lines explore the
relationship between dance notations and a figure’s movement in space. Drawing
from Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook,
which states “a line is a point, which goes for a walk”, Berlin-based artist
Ceal Floyer’s 2008 work, Taking a Line
for a Walk, uses a marking tool to paint a meandering line on the gallery’s
floor, its length dictated by the quantity of paint. The performative element
of drawing is also referred to in German artist Jorinde Voigt’s Botanic Code (2015), which translates
the artist’s perceptions by way of an algorithmic code into a row of painted
aluminium rods leant against a wall.

American conceptual artist Tom
Marioni’s One Second Sculpture (1969)
documents the artist throwing a coiled tape measure into the air and letting it
fall – an act echoed in Jonathan Monk’s neon Fallen (2006) – with the aim of eradicating the distinctions
between sculpture, drawing and performance. Such crossing and erasure of medium
specificity is a feature too of the minimalist sculptor Fred Sandback’s
dematerialised work, Untitled (1974),
which uses ochre coloured yarn to draw lines in space that delineate rather
than occupy volume.

An installation by Susan Hiller, Work in Progress (1980), contains the
residue of a week-long performance by the artist, which involved unravelling
the canvas of a painting into its component parts, each day the resulting
threads re-configured as a ‘doodle’ or ‘thread drawing’. Using the soft
material of tape, Berlin-based installation artist Monika Grzymala and
Seattle-based artist Victoria Haven create new site-specific works for the
exhibition: Grzymala’s durational piece creates a densely crosshatched
maelstrom blizzard of black, in contrast to Haven’s minimalist and geometrical
abstractions; their delicate compositions worked out and painstakingly painted
in advance.